THE HISTORY of the medical profession in the first half of the nineteenth century is, to a considerable extent, the history of the movement for medical reform. In the course of the development of this movement, a large and growing section of the profession put forward demands for the democratic reform of the medical corporations, for changes in the laws relating to medical practice, and for the...

People sometimes try to call others' beliefs into question by pointing out the contingent causal origins of those beliefs. The significance of such 'Etiological Challenges' is a topic that has started attracting attention in epistemology. Current work on this topic aims to show that Etiological Challenges are, at most, only indirectly epistemically significant, insofar as they bring other gener...

This article evaluates the patterns of democracy in the 16 federal states of Germany. By replicating Lijphart's analysis for the German sub-national context, we attempt to explain the connections between the political-institutional variables in the Uinder democracies. Using factor analysis, it is possible to distinguish a three-dimensional pattern. Whereas the western area-states and Saxony ten...

The diverse forms and functions of human music place obstacles in the way of an evolutionary reconstruction of its origins. In the absence of any obvious homologues of human music among our closest primate relatives, theorizing about its origins, in order to make progress, needs constraints from the nature of music, the capacities it engages, and the contexts in which it occurs. Here we propose...

IT is always salutary and oft(en inspiring to look back onl our origins, and to a generation-which has been brought up in the Royal Victoria Hospital, one of the most modertn and best-equipped hospitals in the world, it may be of interest to learn something of what the "o0l(Royal" was like. The building still stands, but greatly altered in appearance. Those who, like myself, first approache(d i...

The origins of farming is the defining event of human history--the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans. With the economic basis provided by farming, human individuals and societies have developed types of material culture that greatly augment powers of memory and computation, ...

One of NASA’s goals is to enable commercial access to space at a cost of $1000/lb (an order of magnitude less than today’s cost) by approximately 2010. Based on results from the 1994 Congressionally mandated, NASA led, Access-to-Space Study, an all rocket-powered single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicle was selected as the best option for meeting the goal. To address the technology develop...